Rune didn’t choose Utopia’s ring but preferred entering another still empty ring. He wasn’t planning or anything, he was just reserving him for later.

The 200 by 200 meters room was put to no gravity mode, the identical conditions they would have to face in the future when they entered the Deep Void Dimension.

2 rings of 80 by 80 meters had been delimited by the holographic projection system, as well as a 200 by 80 meters one.

The 200 meters long one was obviously the one to try kiting and rushing techniques. If within 200 meters you couldn’t keep your opponent from reaching you or reach him, then it meant either your training was lacking, or you were doing things wrong, be it as the pursuer or the pursued.

Rune’s first opponent turned out to be Arik. If he had to describe the nascent tendency of everyone’s fighting style in the group, all were close combat and reinforcement enthusiasts except Gar, Adreana, and Nelo, who were energy enthusiasts.

Personally, Rune had decided to take the camp seriously, he wasn’t going to split his awareness for a real battle, so he didn’t split it for the camp. He was going to fight at 100% of his capabilities.

Soon enough, everything was managed by the virtual assistant and they got to the 2 highlighted extremities of the ring, an 80 by 80 meters one, and waited for the start signal.

But already, before the signal was given, body-shaped energy covers appeared on both Rune and Arik.

When the signal was given, the two of them understood what needed to be done, so they accelerated with their own means, Arik with a classic body control acceleration, and Rune with an explosive momentum-controlled jump.

In only 2 seconds they arrived within close combat reach, they both had yet to start using their precious energy, but the characteristic reinforcement energy vibration appeared as soon as they entered within kicking reach of each other.

Even for the most optimized fighter, a consequent reinforcement would cost them all their 50 energy pool for a simple 5% single-use boost, it had to be clearly stated that the application of the reinforcement fundamental with the original body was really limited.

However, even with a small energy pool of 20, Rune knew that he could gain a small advantage if he was wise. He didn’t know about Arik, but in his case, he was going to evade and favor opportunities more than skilled exchange.

The shorter reach of a shorter body didn’t seem to stop Arik from just going head-on and start the martial spar with a sweeping kick.

Maybe evading with only body control would be cooler, and everything he learned until now would finally be useful, but momentum at full power just rendered it pointless for this one.

Evading with momentum to the side, Rune then used a punch with the ground as support and instantly activated his reinforcement shape.

Before he knew it though, Arik had lowered his body and as Rune followed his evasion move naturally, Arik put a hand on the floor and used it as support to fuse momentum and a big reinforcement to make a kick appear literally before the stomach of Rune.

Being sent flying by the kick, he felt pain, he felt health damage, but there was no confusion in his mind as to why he had failed to evade. It wasn’t a question of reaction speed, it was just Arik fighting smartly, the factor that every opponent should fear when fighting a sapient opponent.

Pulling himself together after the kick, he used momentum and an energy-compressed platform, costing 2 energy, to start his riposte without any timeout.

Arik contorted his body to react faster than his shadow and put his 2 feet on the ground with his momentum creating artificial gravity.

It was a textbook use of momentum to become heavier. This way, nothing short of transmission of 50 strength would be able to move him if he didn’t want to.

‘I accept the challenge.’

Rune liked this one, he used momentum to rush towards Arik and started harassing him with feints while continuously circling around him, slowly or quickly, at a disturbing but steady rhythm.

Waiting for opportunities was his go-to strategy as he supposed Arik had more energy than him, their proficiency in close combat however should be more or less equal.

Feint, feint, another feint, Arik pre-reacted to each one before stopping after seeing it was only a feint.

Rune decided that one of his feints would become real in the next exchange.

Preparing for a quick punch from 2 meters away and positioning his right foot as if he was going to jump at an unprotected side… When his prey reacted, Rune jumped to the side, to seemingly continue circling him, but in reality, he was going all-in.

He prepared all his remaining energy for a single use of reinforcement. Doing a normal kick against the ground while changing his momentum to artificial gravity, he rushed at Arik.

The sudden rush made Arik appear completely defenseless as he had just been repositioning himself for the next feint.

As Rune was prepared for this, he chained his rush with a punch, activating his all-in reinforcement while he was at it.

The punch connected, with all his acceleration and a proper punching form.

Arik was sent flying so hard it looked like an anime fighting scene, with the zone of impact bending the rest of his body.

He flew for tens of meters, only stabilizing at the border of the ring.

The match had only started 20 seconds ago.

Now Rune had to use delaying tactics to let his energy regenerate, a whole minute was one use of reinforcement for him.

A few seconds after being sent flying, Arik came back at full throttle. He seemed resolute to punch his face, so Rune started avoiding direct exchanges like a plague, he only used momentum and body control to delay and flee.

He didn’t forget to use close combat opportunities if Arik made a mistake, but that had more chance to be a feint, so even knowing that regenerating all his energy meant Arik regenerated all his health, he didn’t have a choice.

Every match ended after 15 minutes, with the winner being the one who did the most damage. It was not like winning was important, but it was an indicator of a relative fighting level.

Arik in full throttle was easy to read, his use of momentum seemed very untrained, useless against a trained momentum manipulator like Rune, but no doubt it was going to rapidly become usable after a few days of battles.

Following a whole minute of evading, Rune started another exchange. If Arik used reinforcement for one of his moves, he could now respond in kind.

Arik started a sweeping kick, Rune found an opening and lowered his body before extending into it. It was the primary use of momentum: he could move with his mind. If he saw an opportunity, he could respond at the speed of his thought.

Meaning, reality-defying speed.

Arik took a punch on his side chest, but he didn’t back down, better yet, he grabbed Rune’s hand and with his sphere, Rune knew he was going for a pyrrhic exchange, so he started responding in kind.

If he couldn’t free himself, then evading would be hard, he had to either block as much as he could or forgo defense and focus on offense.

So kick against kick, forearm against punch, it really seemed that Arik had more energy and was profusely using it now.

‘I should have gone for energy first and not affinity.’

The reason Rune had gone for affinity was for farming reasons. It had already been proved that affinity allowed you to detect special resources better after all.

Affinity was also a king stat for his training methods, he could already make elaborate spheres and even compress them to make a shimmering appear in the real air.

But now it came back to bite him the a*s as Arik did 3 continuous reinforcements before freeing him and the two retreated to analyze the situation.

‘Lesson learned in theory and in practice: Don’t get caught in a pyrrhic exchange unless you have a reason.’

That was the goal of the camp, and Arik had also learned things from this exchange, the importance of his energy pool’s size most notably.

As they continued to fight and were in the middle of an exchange, they felt an explosion from the ring where Nelo and Adreana were fighting.

Nelo did something and Adreana was now out of their assigned ring, with energy shimmers flying to the zone of every other fighting ring.

Despite this situation happening though, Rune and Arik only tried to use it as a distraction to ditch a punch or a kick in the gut of the other.

15 minutes after they started fighting, the ring announced the end of their match.

“Good match,” Arik said before leaving without looking at the result.

‘So cool.’

So Rune did the same, he didn’t look at the result and left the ring.

…

In the next fight, Rune waited it out. 7 people and 3 matches, one had to wait and observe.

On the occasion, he decided to observe the Utopia versus Nelo’s match. He wanted to see an energy enthusiast go at it.

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He had been wanting to see a few spells of the new energy institute’s forum and website, but seeing them as they were intended to be used was impressive.

Nelo formed spell matrices in seconds, different energy beams tried to trap Utopia in a never-ending cycle of trying to predict where Nelo would be taking him, and doing his best to escape and rush towards him.

Like the rest of the group, the current Nelo wasn’t a master of his fundamental. But that was only compared to the geniuses.

His grand manipulation energy to damage ratio was 7 energy for 1 health damage while Adreana and Gar were both at 8 energy for 1 health. For the rest of them, the physical enthusiasts, it would be a miracle to have a ratio of 10 energy for 1 health, a 10% energy efficiency.

Tier 2 was supposed to be 100% efficiency, 1 grand or fine manipulation energy for 1 damage, or 1 compressed energy to block 1 health damage. But like everything else, even more than the physical path, there were no experts, no guideline on how to achieve it, just experiments and more experiments.

For the majority of what had been found though, it was just grinding and comprehension.

The spiritual path was the same, but there were even less indicators. Maybe unlimited manual awareness transmission and full control of how it was used? Perfect momentum control with easy use to a specific place, maybe undiscovered uses?

So much remained to be found, they were only newbies in the grand scheme of things.

As predicted, Nelo’s energy pool being far from infinite, his management still lackluster, and his offensive potential being low, Utopia approached faster and faster and he was forced to keep retreating.

He used very intuitive and novel tactics to try and stall Utopia for his energy to come back, but the result was just a combo of 10 punches and kicks and him losing the fight.

‘The learning curve of spells is more abrupt at the beginning, but even later on it doesn’t represent more potential than reinforcement...’

To each their own path, Rune thought. If Nelo had followed the energy path, and Adreana and Gar had also chosen this path, its redeeming qualities must make up for its disadvantages at some point.

The fight ending in 6 minutes wasn’t Utopia winning by a landslide, it was just a bad matchup with everyone gaining insights into how to better themselves and their nascent fighting style.

Utopia had really abused momentum swirl and complete control to make his way to Nelo.

Nelo in turn had used more beams than other spells which could have potentially helped him stall for longer, maybe he really saw potential in it, or he had a trump spell reserved for soon, like the spell he had used against Adreana.

Maybe he just needed time? Or maybe the other spells he had practiced weren’t battle-ready?

Rune himself could only use the energy platform spell, he had rushed the learning process so much that every energy platform he made was similar, so he could of course try to make a platform that could be gripped with his hands, but it would be identical to the one used for his feet.

At the end of every match, the next rotation began, Adreana on the bench and Rune ended up against Gar.

The opening phase of a match against a spellcaster was really difficult, even if he knew he would eventually win, what mattered was how long Gar could hold him back.

He started by using a 20-energy reinforced jump to cover the maximum ground, he would have covered 50 meters in a second if it hadn’t been for an emergency energy bullet he received in the face, stopping his plan, as he was too fast for his momentum to take over and make him evade an extremely fast spell.

And then the bombardment phase started, Gar sent just enough to keep him occupied and not have the time to recuperate and prepare a rush, the energy expenditure necessary to keep him occupied however quickly used Gar's energy pool.

But the two of them already knew what this match was about.

Simple math told the answer, at 50 purity against 50 cohesion, 8 energy exchanged for 1 health, so Gar’s maximum damage was 50 energy for 6 health.

If Rune had only 1 in his cohesion stat, it would be different… But it wasn’t the case. The difference in damage potential at the beginning between physical and energy path was just that abhorrent.

So as Utopia did versus Nelo, Rune combined momentum-supported body control evasions and blocks as Gar eventually ran out of energy, the moment everything came together, he rushed while being wary of a trap.

And after entering the close combat zone, his close combat fundamental gave him an absolute advantage and he used that opportunity to try and win the match with the best combo he could do.

Normal jump acceleration, reinforced kick, momentum upward, descending kick, artificial momentum gravity down, reinforced uppercut, using Gar body as a platform and delivering a double kick.

And then using his perception sphere, he saw Gar's body fly out of the ring.

He had won.

The three spellcasters were all in difficulty, they couldn’t do enough damage to win no matter what as their energy efficiency in their fundamental was too low.

But Utopia didn’t change the rules, if they couldn’t do damage, then they needed to find another way, ether monsters would hunt them down anyway.

The result was them frantically searching the board and the new energy institute for tips from the energy manipulator fighter geniuses.

The camp was really hardcore all things considered, for an entire week they didn’t stop one time.

Rune had thought in a corner of his head that Arik and Gar were a little less involved in the whole new era pioneer thing, but their determination rivaled even himself, erasing that misgiving quickly.

The most shocking turn of the fighting camp was when the three spellcasters found a stopgap spell for their problem.

It was the pulse spell, or shockwave spell.

It belonged to the grand energy manipulation fundamental and used very little energy to produce a pretty powerful anti perimeter shockwave which dealt no damage.

The 3 started using it to increase the duration of their barrage bombardment phase by alternating burst and delay, followed by pulse, then burst, followed by delay, with pulse…

This made Rune and the physical path users develop new ways to approach while being bombarded by spells that disrupted their movements in an extremely chaotic way, worse than in the competent level body control hell’s rooms.

The more time passed, the more this stopgap pulse spell solution worked well, with the spellcasters side controlling for sometimes 6 or 7 minutes the entire rhythm of the battle.

The new spell forced Rune to innovate, when a pulse approached, it wasn’t something that could be evaded, it was a very large zone, so the evading possibilities weren’t endless.

Take a grip on the ground and brace yourselves by using momentum as gravity, make a platform appear and their immovability could serve as a grip in mid-air, use a reinforced jump and rush at the problem…

Those solutions had to be found, they weren’t readily available.

The delaying tactics of spellcasters proved to be an immense challenge, and sometimes to rile up the physical enthusiasts, they made a point in not focusing on dealing damage, but just delaying as much as they could the entire 15 minutes and winning with 1 point of damage dealt.

The opposite of course still happened, pulse wasn’t a miracle spell. If the spellcaster side stopped innovating and observing carefully what the other side was doing, they would be caught up to and receive a combo that made blood flow and pain have a new definition.

The first week eventually concluded. Hundreds of matches, very few breaks, just blood, and battle.

Everyone knew it was a true fighting camp by now, it was the camp designed to help them prepare for their entry into the real new Interdimensional Era, where individual power could perpetually increase with training.

Sometimes, Rune also took breaks, he accumulated so many insights that he had to write them down on information board’s notes to not forget them.

As the first week of the camp came to an end, Utopia ordered the virtual assistant to not start the next round.

After everyone comprehended that the first part of the camp was finished, they gathered around Utopia to wait for his instructions.

“Is someone tired?” He asked this question to be sure and to sound concerned, hearing no answer he continued, “This camp could already be considered a success after those hundreds of battles, but the fact is: We’re still weeks away from finishing the camp.”

“6 against 1, 2 versus 2, complex environment simulations, there’s still so much to do so let’s go! First variation is 2 versus 2, next is 1 versus 2,” as soon as he said that, the delimited rings started morphing.

This week of warm-up had been intense, but that was why they had all come here for. Utopia knew they needed that and he had argued about his point of view strongly enough that the previously 3 absents came here to participate.

As Rune first fight in the new situation of 2 versus 2, he was allied with Adreana against Utopia and Nelo.

Purely from the theoretical level, Rune and Adreana were the underdogs of this round, even more so when considering that Nelo and Utopia were very competitive and had never been considerate in any of their fights until now.

“Adreana, I got a plan. You got one too or I just share mine?” Rune swiftly became competitive faced with the losing odds

“Nope, I just don’t want to be too stomped,” Adreana was in.

With a cooperative partner, Rune started explaining his stupid plan, “Ok, so my plan is something that doesn’t require cooperation but stubbornness. When I enter close combat with Utopia, I want you to bombard our position once you confirm Nelo is preparing his long spell. Just bombard us with pulses, I need chaos to quickly have a chance to take Utopia out, then we’ll have won as Nelo’s big spell can’t take the two of us out.”

With a smirk on her face, Adreana agreed, “Let’s try it then,” and she prepared by positioning herself behind Rune.

Once the signal was given, Nelo and Adreana immediately began to try and get in the way of their opposed warrior, bullets, beams, pulses…

After Rune and Utopia started fighting at short range, they immediately changed focus, and Nelo started to prepare a spell to put Rune out of commission.

As for Adreana, she faked doing the same until she had confirmed Nelo was truly preparing a long spell, most probably the one he had used to win their first match.

She instantly started bombarding Rune’s fight with pulse spells that disrupted what Utopia was planning to do.

Rune even used his only charge of reinforcement to destabilize Utopia even further. So much happened at their position that his human eyes became useless and only his perception sphere informed him of the real situation.

From afar, the situation appeared complicated, but for Rune and Utopia who were in the heart of it, it was the same situation as beginning a match against a spellcaster.

Rune was expecting that they would be equal, so he forced pyrrhic moves and hoped that the chaotic situation would make it so that they became free exchange without counter-attacks involved.

But even winning the first few moves was difficult as Utopia used his momentum on a completely another level, with his perception sphere Rune was able to see him make feints and appear on another side.

When half a minute passed and Utopia was still part of the fight, it was clear that the plan had failed.

Rune retreated to Adreana’s side, making her follow him and advancing towards Nelo while keeping Utopia close to them to force Nelo to damage his ally if he launched his super spell.

But the same as Rune, they had probably established a rough plan and decided to follow it, so Utopia was trying to align the 2 in Nelo’s line of fire.

It was rough, the alignment was rough, but it worked, as Nelo decided to just launch his spell at Rune and be done with it.

The spell was a big sphere of flowing energy, only with complexity could he compensate for its lacking damage. That sphere should be able to deal 20 health damage, and with this loss, Utopia would terminate him.

Rune tried to use a platform as a shield, but the platform disintegrated upon contact with the orb. It wasn’t backed with enough energy, so Rune took the spell.

It was the first time, even across thousands of fights, that he received a true spell, and it was way worse than a punch.

The spell just wouldn’t stop.

His entire body felt unstable once it dissipated, and his reifnorcement shape had also been destroyed, followed by Utopia arriving and doing suicide strikes.

He couldn’t respond at all, and the assistant told him he was eliminated a few dozen seconds later, shortly followed by Adreana after she got beaten up by Utopia without the need for assistance from Nelo.

As Nelo flew out he had a proud smile and announced his victory in an infuriating way, “Spells forever Rune, it’s not that dangerous overall, but I can finally train my true fighting style.”

Once he was down, he sat down with artificial momentum gravity and thought back to what he could have done better in this fight.

‘Everyone’s a newbie, well… An amateur now, so it’s still only the beginning.’

Rune remained undisturbed despite the loss. He knew he had so much to learn, and wins and losses were all learning opportunities, he asked only to learn more.

“I think I can win a 1 against 2 if I play my cards right,” Utopia’s whisper reached Rune’s mind through his perception sphere.

Rune didn’t know how he got this idea, but if he said it, then he should have found a theoretical way to succeed.

‘Maybe? Just need to eliminate one, then delay, then it’s a 1 versus 1.’

A perfect plan, but Utopia had more chance of being pulverized than winning in his opinion.

“Then let’s try it,” said Adreana with a slight smile as she had also heard him and had a small frown on her face.

Utopia lost the 1 versus 2.